Support NeoGAF

[ManaByte]

GOW 2018 was my favorite game of the PS4 gen. I hated Ragnarok so much it took me nearly a year to get through it.

I HATE developers who think they're Kojima by copying the WORST ASPECT OF MGS2 and making you play as some stupid new character instead of the one everyone wants to play as.

Halo 5 did it with Locke.
TLOU2 did it with Abby.
GOW: R did it with Atreus.

Every time the game switched to Atreus I turned it off and played other stuff for weeks before I got the strength to go back and suffer through his levels. The best part of the game was the ending where he leaves Kratos.

 

[3liteDragon]

New ones are way better in almost every aspect & I say almost because the new ones could use bigger boss fights & a camera that's slightly zoomed out a bit.

 

[DryvBy]

I like the new ones in a sense but yes, the old games had a lot more fun to be had with a scale of traversing a huge map.

 

[twilo99]

God of War would have been as dead as Halo if they just kept doing what they were doing.

Halo is a multiplayer game tho ..

 

[Nvzman]

The amount of revisionist history on the old GOW games is astounding

These were the games that were strictly linear with next to no adventure elements, QTEs galore, under developed defensive, countering, movement mechanics. They were notoriously called button mashers because the combat was so shallow. They failed over 6 games to make an interesting weapon that wasn't just a spin off of the blades.They tried to shoe horn in some of the worst platforming mechanics in history. Also the story was garbage after the first game and they spent 6 games just retelling the same trauma in different ways

I loved those games but they were a tier below current GOW and were entirely carried by the insane spectacle they squeezed out of the old PS2 and PS3, and by the time we got to Ascension that aspect wasn't enough to carry how simple the rest of the product was anymore

We also got 6 of them in the span of 8 years. They made that formula as overused as they ever could have

I wouldn't call it revisionist history, I say this as a huge DMC fan (which are usually the people calling GOW a button masher), GOW is only a button masher if you play on easy/maybe normal. You will absolutely get your shit kicked in on hard or higher if you just mash. It was a stupid as fuck criticism then and it still stands now.
Also imo the platforming was only annoying in 1, its dramatically better from 2 onward, and its still better than any of DMC's platforming lol. Also being linear isn't inherently a bad thing, I have no idea how thats a criticism. And the story isn't really garbage, at least 1-3.

Not going to lie, this just sounds like a lot of your complaints when you first played them, not actual widely held criticisms lol. God of War is usually considered to be one of the only good implementations of QTEs too, I regularly remember seeing NeoGaf threads from 10+ years ago where everyone would unanimously agree GoW had amazing QTE sequences, same with Platinum.

 

[Yoboman]

I wouldn't call it revisionist history, I say this as a huge DMC fan (which are usually the people calling GOW a button masher), GOW is only a button masher if you play on easy/maybe normal. You will absolutely get your shit kicked in on hard or higher if you just mash. It was a stupid as fuck criticism then and it still stands now.
Also imo the platforming was only annoying in 1, its dramatically better from 2 onward, and its still better than any of DMC's platforming lol. Also being linear isn't inherently a bad thing, I have no idea how thats a criticism. And the story isn't really garbage, at least 1-3.

Not going to lie, this just sounds like a lot of your complaints when you first played them, not actual widely held criticisms lol. God of War is usually considered to be one of the only good implementations of QTEs too, I regularly remember seeing NeoGaf threads from 10+ years ago where everyone would unanimously agree GoW had amazing QTE sequences, same with Platinum.

Not my complaint, they were widely used critiques by those who didn't want to give GOW credit, but they werent a big deal to fans because GOW1-3 did things other games didn't at the time. Doesn't mean those criticisms weren't widely acknowledged, especially by Ninja Gaiden and DMC fans by comparison. QTEs were a regular criticism.

I point all this out because it's revisionist history. All this nitpicking of modern God of War is the same nonsense that the original saga went through. Now you have those people who were nitpicking that saga saying "ackshually it was better back then" when it's just another angle to try and criticise something that is hard to criticise

 

[Guerilla Munch]

the original trilogy was the manliest shit ever, i mean in the third game you

Spoiler

literally scale Olympus and buttfuck Zeus in his asshole

this new God of War: My Wife's Son just doesn't hit the same

 

[Roberts]

I liked 2018 GoW a lot. Speaking of scale, I kind of loved that they went the opposite way and made the story very intimate - it's basically about him trying to bury his wife (I can't for the life of me remember why Jeremy Davies kept on attacking me, though). The good stuff is that it is a very polished game. The combat felt great - it felt like everything has weight and that doesn't happen often in games like this. I never got to play the sequel but I talked to my playstation friends about it and pretty much everyone was somewhat disappointed with it. Some didn't even bothered to finish it.

 

[ahtlas7]

There is room in the market to have both versions of GOW. I bet both would sell wildly. 2 teams producing content.

 

[Zuzu]

Atreus has become quite an unlikeable character in Ragnarok. And his new girlfriend is annoying too.

 

[zeldaring]

GOW 2018 was my favorite game of the PS4 gen. I hated Ragnarok so much it took me nearly a year to get through it.

I HATE developers who think they're Kojima by copying the WORST ASPECT OF MGS2 and making you play as some stupid new character instead of the one everyone wants to play as.

Halo 5 did it with Locke.
TLOU2 did it with Abby.
GOW: R did it with Atreus.

Every time the game switched to Atreus I turned it off and played other stuff for weeks before I got the strength to go back and suffer through his levels. The best part of the game was the ending where he leaves Kratos.

I enjoyed it but i agree with you on most of these especially MGS2, and TLOU2. In GOW:R you mostly played as kratos and i think the atreus gameplay should have been no more then 2 hours

 

[zeldaring]

the original trilogy was the manliest shit ever, i mean in the third game you

Spoiler

literally scale Olympus and buttfuck Zeus in his asshole

this new God of War: My Wife's Son just doesn't hit the same

lmao That sounds more gay then manly.

 

[Paltheos]

probably super controversial cause the new ones are so popular, but I just finished replaying the original trilogy this weekend, and man... there's no contest, the new games are good but they're not even god of war. the older games' brutality, their sense of scale, their amazing encounter design, the incredible boss fights... all of that's just gone in the new ones. and I get the series needed to change, after ascension (which I also tried to make part of the replay but, as with every single other time I've tried to play it, gave up a few hours in because it sucks) it was clear the old style needed some updates.

The formula wasn't the problem; the packages were. Ascension had basic mechanical issues that weren't playtested effectively and overemphasized for most of the run; the second half of the game is surprisingly not shit. God of War 3 had the dumb Pandora subplot to extend the last game's climax into a whole video game and which whiffed anyway by trying to paint Kratos in any sort of sympathetic light instead of the total murder-raging psychopath he is at that point (not that 'kill-crazy' isn't in the game, just that the contrast we see makes no sense), and the game had repetitive weapon design, bizarrely (why did all the weapons have chains lol).

The PSP games show there was life in the formula still. The Gauntlet of Zeus is a baller-as-fuck subweapon that almost carries a technically weak game like Chains of Olympus on its own, and Ghost of Sparta is a solid all-around experience.